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Is Peter the Rock or Christ?

Peter is the visible head of the Church, and Christ the invisible eternal Head of the Church. But these two are one, so that the Church does not have two heads. This mystical unity between Christ and His Vicar is crucial to the understanding of the Roman Pontiff as the head of the Church, the body of Christ.

Pius XII: “Christ and His Vicar constitute one only Head” of the one Church [Mystical Body of Christ 40]. Other sources (Unam Sanctam; Roman Catechism) say the same thing, with Pope Boniface in Unam Sanctam rejecting out right that the Church has two heads (“like a monster”). Peter (and each successor) is the visible head, and Christ the eternal (invisible, we say) Head, but their unity gives the Pope divine authority, despite being a fallen sinner with a limited earthly reign.

Peter (and each successor) is the visible Rock and Christ is the eternal invisible Rock. And so, just as the clearly taught mystical unity between Christ and His Vicar constitutes one only Head, not two, this same mystical unity constitutes one only Rock: Christ and the Roman Pontiff. As for Peter, “for ever he lives and presides and exercises judgment in his successors the bishops of the Holy Roman See, which he founded and consecrated with his blood” (Pastor Aeternus 2, 2), and so Peter never ceases to be the Rock, in the sense that he presides through his successors.

Leo XIII teaches in Satis Cognitum 12:

“And since all Christians must be closely united in the communion of one immutable faith, Christ the Lord, in virtue of His prayers, obtained for Peter that in the fulfilment of his office he should never fall away from the faith. “But I have asked for thee that thy faith fail not” (Luke xxii., 32), and He furthermore commanded him to impart light and strength to his brethren as often as the need should arise: “Confirm thy brethren” (Ibid.). He willed then that he whom He had designated as the foundation of the Church should be the defense of its faith. “Could not Christ who confided to him the Kingdom by His own authority have strengthened the faith of one whom He designated a rock to show the foundation of the Church?” (S. Ambrosius, De Fide, lib. iv., n. 56).

“For this reason Jesus Christ willed that Peter should participate in certain names, signs of great things which properly belong to Himself alone: in order that identity of titles should show identity of power. So He who is Himself “the chief corner-stone in whom all the building being framed together, groweth up in a holy temple in the Lord” (Eph. ii., 21), placed Peter as it were a stone to support the Church. “When he heard ‘thou art a rock,’ he was ennobled by the announcement. Although he is a rock, not as Christ is a rock, but as Peter is a rock. For Christ is by His very being an immovable rock; Peter only through this rock. Christ imparts His gifts, and is not exhausted…. He is a priest, and makes priests. He is a rock, and constitutes a rock” (Hom. de Poenitentia, n. 4 in Appendice opp. S. Basilii [attributed to St. Basil])

Pope Leo XIII teaches that Christ is the Rock on which the Church is founded, just as Christ is also the Head of the Church. But Peter and his successors are each Rock and Head due to their mystical unity with Christ. Peter is Head and Rock only through Christ. Since the Church is the body of Christ, Peter alone cannot be its Head; Christ must be the Head of His own body. But Christ gifted the Church with a visible Head, united to himself as one Head, and the same for the foundational Rock of the Church. That Rock is Peter and his successors, not Peter alone historically, but Peter in his successors. But Peter can only be the foundational Rock of the Body of Christ through Christ, the Cornerstone of the Church. These are not two different roles, Cornerstone and Rock. Rather, Christ is the Rock or Cornerstone (in Hebrew “Head of the Corner”) and so is Peter, through his mystical unity with Christ.

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